Dressing Solange and Channeling Patrick Kelly: Why Gerlan Jeans Is the Provocative Look of Now

Gerlan Marcel, the effervescent designer behind pop New York streetwear label Gerlan Jeans, is on a train to Philadelphia where her exhibition “Gerlan Jeans Loves Patrick Kelly,” opens this Sunday alongside the main exhibition “Patrick Kelly: Runway of Love” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since launching in 2009, Gerlan Jeans has become a go-to for cool girls and pop stars who are unafraid of a bright, bold print and a witty saying scrawled on their sleeves. There was Katy Perry in a slime-green bikini top at the Nickelodeon Kids’s Choice Awards, Beyoncé in an alien sequence dress, and Solange too many times to count. “The Gerlan woman likes to be noticed and interact with her environment,” Marcel says. But all significant inspiration, she’s quick to point out, is ultimately due to her hero, Mr. Kelly.

To hear Marcel talk of Kelly is a mix of idol worship, profound spiritual connection, and pure joy. “Kismet is really the best word to describe the moment I discovered him,” she recounts over the phone from her train car. For the record, that moment was in 2006, when Marcel was designing prints for Jeremy Scott. To the uninitiated, Patrick Kelly, who passed away in 1990, was a Mississippi-born designer who rose to fame in the eighties and found unprecedented success in Paris for a young African American (he was the first to be admitted to the prestigious Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode). His signature tube-knit dresses and embellished denim pieces were exuberant and playful in the era of pouf skirts and shoulder pads, but perhaps most memorable was his unflinchingly humorous use of loaded racial imagery, like golliwogs, in his designs and branding. His was a bright and brilliant life cut tragically short (Kelly died on New Year’s Day 1990 at age 35) and his legacy is all too overlooked in the pantheon of great designers.

Enter the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which not only wanted to curate an exhibition on Kelly’s work but to do it along with a contemporary designer who is picking up his mantle of fun, provocative fashion. “The curator Dilys Blum made the connection between the two of us via Google,” Marcel says. “When they were doing research online for the main exhibition my name kept popping up, because I always talk about him in interviews. When I got an email from my press person that they wanted to talk to me about Patrick, I nearly passed out.”

After meeting with the museum in a room of fully accessorized Kelly looks (“where I basically broke down into tears (of joy). It was beyond overwhelming,” Marcel says), she and the museum decided to run a companion exhibition featuring Marcel’s work as a modern counterpart. Marcel, who grew up between Ohio and London, sold her first designs to Deadheads in the nineties while traveling with the Grateful Dead: rough-hewn dresses made from her mother’s stock of Liberty pPrints—so rough hewn, in fact, that she called them “boob curtains.” After earning her MA from Central Saint Martins, Marcel worked in New York for Jeremy Scott and Patricia Field (Field hosted Marcel’s first show in her home). “The idea of using imagery and glyphs in unexpected ways is definitely something that comes from Patrick, and from my time with Jeremy and Pat Field,” she explains. “It’s the idea that now there is no reference point that is a faux pas. It’s what you do with it. I always say we’re very serious about not taking ourselves seriously.”

But as the countdown to her opening begins, she is humble at the thought of being presented in the company of her idol. “I do feel his presence in me and it’s very overwhelming in a way,” Marcel says. “I would hope he would laugh and smile at my clothes and feel the energy and the life. Because for Patrick everything was a celebration of life.”